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(POSTPONED) Thurston Lectures: Uncertainty Principles and the Modular Bootstrap
William Thurston Lectures| Speaker: | Dr. Henry Cohn, Microsoft Research |
| Related Webpage: | https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/research/seminars/thurston/ |
| Location: | |
| Start time: | Thu, May 21 2020, 4:10PM |
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a fundamental fact in harmonic analysis. It's often described in terms of quantum mechanics, but it simply amounts to a constraint on the behavior of a function and its Fourier transform. For example, a musical note cannot be sharply concentrated in both time and frequency. More generally, an uncertainty principle limits the control we can have over both a function and its Fourier transform simultaneously. In this talk, we'll examine an uncertainty principle of Bourgain, Clozel, and Kahane for signs of functions, which turns out to be connected to both sphere packing and quantum gravity.
Thurston LECTURES will move to 2021.